Colour charts are prepared by manufacturers of paints, inks, dyestuffs and coloured products as diverse as motor vehicles and sewing threads. Usually, they are published as printed colours, laid out in some sort of array, on paper, but swatch cards are also produced by, for example, manufacturers of fabrics, laminates and so forth in which the colours are shown on the fabric or laminate itself. The colours are selected in accordance with the preferences of an individual or panel of people, perhaps after some market research, and assigned more or less fanciful names such as Nile Green or Dusky Peach. Disclaimers are often made as to the reproducibility of the chart colours, especially in regard to the differences brought about by application to the intended substrate as compared with the chart colour on its paper substrate.
Some colour charts, comprehensive enough to be termed ‘colour libraries’ are necessarily arranged in some kind of logical order. Among these may be mentioned the CIELAB colour model, and the Pantone, Scott Dic and Munsell systems. At least one of these libraries has been transferred from the physical samples to an electronic version in which the colours are stored as brightness, hue and chroma values for displaying a colour on a colour monitor. A problem with electronic representation, of course, can be appreciated by casual observation of television sets in a dealer's window—not all the sets will be showing the same colour, despite receiving the same signal.
A shortfall of all of these systems is that by no means all available colours are represented. Even though, typically, there may be some 1700 colours in such a library, manufacturers are not infrequently asked for ‘specials’, colours not represented by chart colours.